The True Cost of Mental Illness

More than one in four American adults suffers from mental disorders in a given year.

Mental disorders are the leading cause of disability in the U.S.

60% of Americans with a mental disorder get no treatment for their ailment at all.

Only 6.2% of U.S. health care spending is devoted to the treatment of mental disorders. 

Too many people living with mental illness are ending up in our jails or homeless, often as a result of untreated or undertreated illness. How will you reduce the number of people living with mental illness in our streets and criminal justice systems?

Mental disorders cost the United States more than $150 billion each year for treatment, for lost productivity, for the costs of social service and disability payments made to patients, and premature mortality. And this is a conservative estimate. Reducing the costs and correcting the shortcomings of our health care system requires policies which acknowledge that mental illnesses can be diagnosed precisely and treated effectively.

Severe mental illnesses, which afflict about 6% of American adults, cost society $193.2 billion in lost earnings per year. Yet, corporate America has few employer-backed health plans offering any coverage for workers' mental conditions. 

One longtime barrier to psychiatric care has been reluctance by insurance companies to consider mental illnesses on par with physical ones and thus not pay as well to treat them. Mental illness and drug addiction are every bit as real and serious as physical illness, and by providing intervention and early treatment we may be able to prevent more serious and costly conditions as well as unimaginable suffering in the future.

Mental illness is every bit as serious as physical illness.

In a study comparing depression treatment costs to lost productivity costs, 45 to 98 percent of treatment costs were offset by increased productivity. Appropriate and timely treatment of severe mental disorders would decrease the use and cost of medical services by people with these illnesses, yielding savings greater than the cost of providing these treatment services.

Additional benefits of providing timely and sufficient treatments for mental illnesses include a decrease of the homeless and prison population.

From Aaron Swartz's (hactivist who died by suicide) blogpost, Sick:

The economist Richard Layard, after advocating that the goal of public policy should be to maximize happiness, set out to learn what the greatest impediment to happiness was today. His conclusion: depression. Depression causes nearly half of all disability, it affects one in six, and explains more current unhappiness than poverty. And (important for public policy) Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy has a short-term success rate of 50%. Sadly, depression (like other mental illnesses, especially addiction) is not seen as “real” enough to deserve the investment and awareness of conditions like breast cancer (1 in 8) or AIDS (1 in 150). And there is, of course, the shame.

 From the article, Mental health care in U.S. questioned amid another tragedy:

Dr. Jeffrey Lieberman, chairman of psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center in New York City, said shortcomings in mental health care are a very real problem. He told former assistant director of the FBI and CBS News senior correspondent John Miller on Monday that it's a societal problem because the U.S. has not taken on the treatment of mental illness as effectively as it could.

Only 5.6 percent of national health care spending goes towards mental health treatment, The Washington Post reported. Most of that money is spent on prescription drugs and outpatient treatment in a psychiatrist's office that some sufferers may not even choose to seek.

He added that the mental health care infrastructure just isn't there compared to care for other diseases. For example, a patient with cancer would be placed on a scientifically-backed comprehensive treatment plan with well-trained doctors for chemotherapy, radiation, etc., whereas people seeking mental health treatment need to do more work on their end not only find treatment but overcome these disincentives to get care. 

"Our society, with its stigma on mental illness and its broken healthcare system, does not provide us with other options," [Liza Long, the author of the post "I Am Adam Lanza's Mother"] wrote. "Then another tortured soul shoots up a fast food restaurant. A mall. A kindergarten classroom. And we wring our hands and say, 'Something must be done.' I agree that something must be done. It's time for a meaningful, nation-wide conversation about mental health."

But money should not have to be primary motivator. Because acting out of a purely financial motive is cold and soulless and is like a an insurance company deciding to not recall faulty vehicles because the total cost of the recall would be more then the cost of paying off lawsuits filed by the deceased victims' families.

Anyone who has experience serious mental illness knows that the suffering is inhuman, and no person should be allowed to experience it. Especially not when mental disorders are among the most treatable ones.

Sources: Tallying Mental Illness' Costs, Mental health care in U.S. questioned amid another tragedy, Sick